Home

For Teaching

Ezekiel 25: What the Passage Says

60 claims across 17 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Ezekiel 25 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

The LORD gives Ezekiel a series of short messages against nations near Judah: Ammon, Moab and Seir, Edom, and the Philistines. Each nation is charged with how it acted toward Judah when Jerusalem fell, and Ammon with gloating over the sanctuary, and each is told what will be done to it in return. This begins the section of the book that turns from Israel to the surrounding nations, and most of the messages end with the statement that they will know that he is the LORD, the message against Edom with their knowing his vengeance.

Claim by Claim

  1. 25:1
    • The word of the LORD came to the prophet.
    • The word of the LORD came saying the following.
  2. 25:2
    • God addressed the prophet as son of man.
    • God told him to set his face against the Ammonites.
    • God told him to prophesy against the Ammonites.
  3. 25:3
    • God told the prophet to say to the Ammonites: Hear the word of the Lord GOD.
    • Thus says the Lord GOD.
    • The Ammonites said Aha against God's sanctuary when it was profaned.
    • The Ammonites said Aha against the land of Israel when it was made desolate.
    • The Ammonites said Aha against the house of Judah when they went into exile.
  4. 25:4
    • Therefore God will give the Ammonites to the people of the east as a possession.
    • The people of the east will set their encampments among the Ammonites.
    • The people of the east will place their dwellings among the Ammonites.
    • The people of the east will eat the Ammonites' fruit.
    • The people of the east will drink the Ammonites' milk.
  5. 25:5
    • God will make Rabbah a pasture for camels.
    • God will make the Ammonites a resting place for flocks.
    • They will know that God is the LORD.
  6. 25:6
    • Thus says the Lord GOD.
    • The Ammonite clapped his hand.
    • The Ammonite stamped with his foot.
    • The Ammonite rejoiced with all the contempt of his soul against the land of Israel.
  7. 25:7
    • Therefore God will stretch out his hand against the Ammonite.
    • God will give the Ammonite as plunder to the nations.
    • God will cut the Ammonite off from the peoples.
    • God will make the Ammonite perish out of the countries.
    • God will destroy the Ammonite.
    • The Ammonite will know that God is the LORD.
  8. 25:8
    • Thus says the Lord GOD.
    • Moab and Seir said that the house of Judah is like all the nations.
  9. 25:9
    • Therefore God will open the flank of Moab, starting from its cities, from its cities at its frontier.
    • The cities are the glory of the land.
    • The cities named are Beth-jeshimoth, Baal-meon, and Kiriathaim.
  10. 25:10
    • God will give Moab, along with the Ammonites, to the people of the east as a possession.
    • God does this so that the Ammonites will not be remembered among the nations.
  11. 25:11
    • God will execute judgments upon Moab.
    • They will know that God is the LORD.
  12. 25:12
    • Thus says the Lord GOD.
    • Edom acted against the house of Judah by taking vengeance.
    • Edom became greatly guilty.
    • Edom revenged himself upon them.
  13. 25:13
    • Therefore thus says the Lord GOD.
    • God will stretch out his hand against Edom.
    • God will cut off man and beast from Edom.
    • God will make Edom desolate from Teman.
    • Those of Dedan will fall by the sword.
  14. 25:14
    • God will lay his vengeance on Edom by the hand of his people Israel.
    • Israel will do in Edom according to God's anger and according to his fury.
    • They will know God's vengeance.
    • This is the declaration of the Lord GOD.
  15. 25:15
    • Thus says the Lord GOD.
    • The Philistines acted in vengeance.
    • The Philistines took vengeance with contempt of soul.
    • The Philistines took vengeance to destroy with perpetual hatred.
  16. 25:16
    • Therefore thus says the Lord GOD.
    • God will stretch out his hand against the Philistines.
    • God will cut off the Cherethites.
    • God will destroy the remnant of the sea coast.
  17. 25:17
    • God will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes.
    • They will know that God is the LORD when he lays his vengeance upon them.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

25:1
In the King James, LORD and GOD printed in capitals stand for the personal name of Israel's God, four Hebrew consonants usually written Yahweh, which Jewish readers did not pronounce aloud. Where the text has "Lord GOD" it is translating two Hebrew words together, roughly "my master Yahweh." Ordinary "Lord" in lower case is a different word meaning master.
25:2
"Son of man" is how God addresses Ezekiel throughout the book; in Hebrew it simply means "human being" or "mortal," marking the distance between the speaker and the man spoken to. "Turn and face" describes a literal prophetic gesture: the prophet physically turned toward a nation and spoke, the way a person squares up to an opponent. The Ammonites lived east of the Jordan River, in what is now central Jordan, and were long-standing neighbors and rivals of Israel.
25:3
The "holy house" is the temple in Jerusalem; it was looted and burned by the Babylonians in 586 BC. To treat it "as common ground" translates a word meaning to strip something of its set-apart status and handle it like any ordinary place. "Carried off as prisoners" refers to the deportations in which Babylon marched the population of Judah into exile, Ezekiel himself was among them, and was writing from Babylonia.
25:4
"The people from the east" are the nomadic desert tribes living beyond the settled farmland of Ammon. The picture is of herders moving their tents onto cultivated land and living off crops and livestock they did not raise.
25:5
Rabbah was the capital of Ammon, on the site of modern Amman. Turning a capital city into grazing ground for camels and sheep is an image of total collapse: the walls and buildings gone, only herders passing through.
25:6
Clapping the hands and stamping the feet were public gestures of derision, the physical equivalent of jeering at someone's downfall, not applause in the modern sense.
25:7
"Reach out my hand against" is a stock Hebrew phrase for taking direct action to strike someone; it recurs throughout this chapter.
25:8
Moab lay east of the Dead Sea, south of Ammon. Seir is the mountainous region south-east of the Dead Sea, and is used here as another name for Edom. The taunt is that Judah has turned out to be no different from any other small nation, its God no more able to protect it than theirs.
25:9
"Leave Moab's side open" uses the language of a body or a walled town exposed at the flank, where an attacker breaks through. Beth-jeshimoth, Baal-meon, and Kiriathaim were towns on Moab's northern frontier, the region's most valuable territory.
25:12
Edom, south-east of Judah, was traditionally reckoned as descended from Esau, the brother of Israel's ancestor Jacob, so hostility between the two was understood as a family quarrel. Other biblical writers accuse Edom of helping itself when Jerusalem fell to Babylon, seizing territory and handing over refugees.
25:13
Teman and Dedan were at opposite ends of Edomite territory, north and south; naming both is a way of saying "the whole country, end to end."
25:14
"By the hand of my people Israel" means the punishment will be carried out by human beings, an Israelite army, rather than by some direct act of God. The Hebrew word for vengeance covers legal retribution, a penalty imposed for an offense, as well as personal revenge.
25:15
The Philistines occupied the coastal plain along the Mediterranean, south-west of Judah, in and around Gaza. The "old hatred" points back to centuries of border warfare between them and Israel, going back to the era of Samson, Samuel, Saul, and David.
25:16
The Cherethites were a group closely associated with the Philistines, and the name is generally taken to indicate an origin in Crete or the wider Aegean, from which the Philistines are thought to have migrated. There is a wordplay in the Hebrew that English cannot carry: the verb "cut off" and the name "Cherethites" sound alike.
25:17
"Rebukes" in 1611 English could mean acts of punishment, not merely angry words, so the phrase describes what is done to the Philistines rather than what is said to them.

Read Ezekiel 25